i the family and general background of queen hetep-heres i

I

THE FAMILY AND GENERAL BACKGROUND OF QUEEN HETEP-HERES I

N the years which have intervened since the discovery of the tomb of the mother of Cheops, Queen I Hetep-heres I, in February 1925, nothing has been found to alter the ingenious explanation which Dr. George A. Reisner offered for the unique reburial of that queen’s funerary equipment. The alabaster sarcophagus found in the intact secret tomb at Giza (G 7000 X) should have contained the body of one of the most important ladies of the Old Kingdom. The fact that it was completely empty certainly called for some explanation. Reisner believed that at about the year 15¹ of Cheops’s reign it was discovered that thieves had broken into the burial chamber of his mother in the old royal cemetery at Dahshur. At this time all construction work was concentrated at Giza, where the king’s pyramid was nearing completion and that of his chief queen was just being started. Strict supervision in the Dahshur cemetery must have been somewhat relaxed as attention was focused on the new project (about 2650 B.c.).

Hetep-heres was the wife of the first king of Dynasty IV, Sneferu, who presented her with the great gold bed canopy which bears his name and titles. She must have outlived her husband, since the objects in her tomb were sealed by the mortuary establishment of her son Cheops. In all probability Cheops arranged for her funeral in a tomb which lay beside the northern of the two pyramids at Dahshur which seems to have been the tomb of Sneferu. Builders’ marks have been found in recent years on both pyramids which give the Horus name of Sneferu, Neb-maat. In addition, the cartouche name Sneferu was found twice on the masonry of the southern pyramid, the so-called Bent Pyramid. The type of construction of the northern pyramid is the more advanced of the two, and its casing bears the dates of the 15th and 16th occasions of the biennial cattle count. The first appears on a block at the base of the southwest corner and the second on one of the casing stones higher up on the face of the pyramid. These dates would seem to fall at the end of Sneferu’s 24-year reign as given by the Turin Papyrus.² In addition to these dates, there is one further piece of evidence which suggests that Sneferu was actually buried in the northern pyramid. This is the decree of Pepy II concerning the administration of Sneferu’s

¹From a somewhat doubtful quarry mark giving the 8th occasion of the cattle count found on a block of masonry from the wall of the comdor near the entrance to the Cheops temple.

²As Sir Alan Gardiner has recently reaffirmed (Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, 31, 1945, pp. 11 ff.), dates are indicated in the Old Kingdom by stating the recurrence of the cattle count which was held every two years. Although Gardiner believes that the year of the first counting followed that of the king’s accession which was termed the ‘Year of the Joining of the Two Lands’, it is not certain that this accession year might not also have been termed that of the ‘First Occasion’. One might question whether the two-year periods could not have continued from reign to reign. In this case, if the last counting had fallen in the next to the last year of the preceding king, the following census may have occurred in the first year of the next king. It seems safer to follow Reisner in calculating the actual regnal year by doubling the number of the stated cattle count and then subtracting one

year to allow for the possibility that a count was taken in the first year. Unfortunately, the Palermo Stone shows that an excep- tional situation existed in the reign of Sneferu. No census was taken in the year after the 6th counting, as one normally should expect, but the 7th and 8th counts fell in successive years. This can be taken to mean that a biennial cattle count was made up until the 13th year (7th occasion), but after that until the end of the reign the counting was made annually. Although this is far from certain, it would allow for an agreement between the 24-. year reign given by the Turin Papyrus and the date of the 16th occasion (year 22) on the North Pyramid at Dahshur (Lepsius, Denkmäler II, pl. I) as well as a possible 17th occasion (year 23) for Sneferu at Medum (Petrie, Meydum and Memphis, III 190, pl. V). The untimely death of Abdessalam M. Hussein has inter- rupted work at Dahshur and prevented publication of the inscriptions. He was kind enough to send me photographs of them when they were discovered.

2 THE TOMB OF HETEP-HERES

funerary temple, which was found in what seems to have been the valley temple of the North Stone Pyramid at Dahshur.

Abdessalam Hussein believed that he had identified the original tomb of Hetep-heres in the small pyramid that lies south of the Bent Pyramid at Dahshur. It was pointed out, however, that the rough builders’ marks which suggested the queen’s name could really not be convincingly combined as elements of that name. Moreover, the chamber of that pyramid is much too small to have contained the burial equipment. Finally, the blocking is still in place so that only a slim man can wriggle through the hole made by the thieves. There is no possibility that furniture could have been removed from that chamber, much less the alabaster sarcophagus of Hetep-heres. Therefore, it seems best still to look for the original tomb beside the North Stone Pyramid at Dahshur as Reisner did, although he believed at that time that the Bent Pyramid might have belonged to Huni. It seems unlikely that Sneferu can have built three pyramids, and I am inclined to believe that he may have finished the Medum Pyramid for his predecessor Huni, who had all but completed it at the time of his death. This would perhaps account for the later graffiti in the temple of the Medum Pyramid which ascribe it to Sneferu, and would perhaps mean that the dates on the casing blocks, such as the 17th occasion mentioned above, refer to the reign of Sneferu rather than to that of Huni.

Hetep-heres would appear to have been the daughter of the rather shadowy figure, Huni, the last king of Dynasty 111. Virtually nothing is known about this king except for a later statement in the Prisse Papyrus that he died and was succeeded by Sneferu. It has been assumed that his daughter who bears the title ‘Daughter of the God’ was one of those great ladies who carried the blood royal over from one dynasty to the next and that her marriage with Sneferu provided his chief claim to the throne. She lived at that crucial moment when the royal house was in the process of reaching for the first time a summit of absolute power which perhaps was never quite equaled again in Egyptian history. This power is still physically embodied in the two Dahshur pyramids of Sneferu and in those of Cheops and Chephren at Giza. It is ironical to think that such prestige was insufficient to protect the body of Hetep- heres from destruction by thieves not so long after her burial. One can imagine that such an act of desecration would not have been easy to report to Cheops. This makes even more plausible Reisner’s explanation that when the news reached the vizier, and when he understood that the greater part of the funerary equipment was unharmed, he ordered the lid to be replaced on the empty sarcophagus and made every effort to convince the king that little damage had been done but that it would be safer to transfer the burial to the new cemetery at Giza. There is every evidence that he succeeded.

The chief point observed from the beginning about the tomb of Hetep-heres at Giza was that it was intended to be concealed and that there never had been any trace of the superstructure with its offering chapel which is normal in the construction of Old Kingdom tombs. The mouth of the shaft itself had been filled with irregularly shaped stones resembling the surrounding surface of the rock and plastered together. The same treatment had been applied to the opening into the short stairway which connected with the shaft near its top. The whole irregular rock surface of the adjoining area had been covered with a layer of limestone gravel debris which formed the street floor of the Fourth Dynasty level. Dr. Reisner has described in detail in A History of the Giza Necropolis, vol. I,³ pp. 70 ff., how the preliminary cutting for the entrance passage of the First Queen’s Pyramid (G I-a) and the first course of masonry framing this passage was abandoned. The site of this pyramid G I-a was then shifted some meters to the west where it lay in the comer formed by the east wall of the king’s temple and the juncture of the causeway corridor with this wall. A glance at the map in Fig. I will suggest immediately that this alteration in plan

³Harvard University Press, 1942. In the following text, references to this work will be given simply as Vol. I.

THE FAMILY AND BACKGROUND OF HETEP-HERES I

was caused by the fact that the northern face of the base of the queen’s pyramid, as originally planned, would have run very closes to the mouth of the shaft of Queen Hetep-heres I (G 7000 X). As Reisner has pointed out, it is also clear that at this time no other structure could have been commenced in the Eastern Cemetery, except for the pyramid temple. The original plan of the First Queen’s Pyramid would have covered part of the area later occupied by the mastaba of the Crown Prince Ka-wab (G 7110-7120). The seven other twin-mastabas of the family of Cheops in the Eastern Cemetery were laid out upon a unified plan with that of Ka-wab and could not have been commenced until work on his tomb was begun.

I think it must be accepted that, except for the food offering which Cheops deposited for his mother in a niche part way down the shaft of the secret tomb, the funerary services of the queen were intended to be maintained as they were originally endowed in the chapel of her first tomb at Dahshur. Until further excavation has been carried out around the northern pyramid at Dahshur, it is impossible to be sure whether the superstructure of this tomb was in the form of a pyramid. At present no trace of such a pyramid is apparent on the surface of the ground. It is not easy to visualize what form the chapel of such a tomb may have had. In this period we have only private tombs which show either a cruciform chapel or deep niches in the face of the mastaba. These were lined with blocks of limestone and decorated with rather heavy, boldly carved reliefs with figures on a large scale. Such offering niches appear in the tomb of Iyenefer at Dahshur, while at Medum even deeper niches in the form of a long corridor (in the tomb of Nefermaat and Atet) were modified by an addition to the mastaba into the form of decorated cruciform chapel, which we also know at Saqqara at the time of Sneferu.

It is impossible to say how a queen’s chapel of the time of Huni and Sneferu might have differed from these cruciform chapels of the great people of the court. Except in the case of the small and very simple chapel of the Medum Pyramid, we do not even have evidence for the form and decoration of a king’s temple.4 It is therefore perhaps worth while to examine what little has survived from the chapels of Cheops’s queens. Not very many years can have elapsed between the burial of Hetep-heres at Dahshur and the building of these chapels at Giza. Unfortunately, that of the First Queen’s Pyramid ( G I-a) has been completely destroyed, leaving only the surface of the rock which had been cleared to take the foundations. The middle one of the three pyramids (G I-b) seems to have been built at the same time, while the third (G I-c) can be hardly much later, although it was placed back a little from the line formed by the-eastern faces of the other two. The chapel of G I-c was altered drastically in the Twenty-first Dynasty when it was enlarged to form a temple of Isis of the Pyramids, somehow associated with its original owner, Queen Henutsen. There still remains of the old construction a north-south offering room with entrance in the middle of the east wall. Palace façade paneling covered the outer face of the east wall which perhaps opened on a court. Inside, one niche is preserved at the southern end of the west wall and was perhaps originally balanced by a second niche near the north end of the wall. Two niches certainly existed in the west wall of the chapel of Pyramid G I-b, although little is preserved but the lines of the plan incised on the pavement, and part of the southern end of the west wall. The incisions in the pavement indicate that the chapel consisted of a long north-south offering room entered in the middle of the east wall by a corridor. All three of these chapels perhaps had additions of store-chambers constructed in brick and an open court. The temple of Cheops, itself, seems to have had a fairly simple sanctuary, but this was approached through a large court surrounded by a colonnade of square granite pillars. This makes one wonder if at Medum there had not been planned a court outside the little sanctuary which is now preserved. If so, the plan was abandoned at the death of the king. The court would have lain inside the enclosure wall, not east of it as is the case in the later temples of Dynasty IV.

3

4 Since this was written, wall reliefs have been found by Dr. Ahmed Fakhry in the Valley Temple of the Bent Pyramid at Dahshur.


In the case of Pyramid G I-b a few fragments of beautifully executed very low white limestone reliefs were found in such a position near the floor level that they must have belonged to the decoration of the chapel. Although very fragmentary, there are elements of inscription that must have belonged to one of the false-doors (see Fig. 4). These false-doors are not of the deep-niche type which occur in the twin- mastabas of the Eastern Cemetery (Vol. I , figs. 194, 195) but have the rather shallow form that appears in chapels in the Western Cemetery of the reign of Cheops (loc. cit., fig. 196). Part of a scene showing attendants and a presentation of animals probably came from the west wall between the niches (Fig. 3). More unusual is a representation of a boat being paddled by a number of men, which seems to be one of the earliest examples of a scene showing the voyages from Buto to Heliopolis and the ‘Field of Offer- ings’ which appears in private tombs toward the end of Dynasty IV (Fig. 2). As in these later chapels, this may have been placed over the entrance doorway on the east wall.

Since the question of the hypothetical decoration of the chapel of Hetep-heres at Dahshur is inti- mately bound up with our speculation concerning the decoration of the royal funerary temples of the period of the reigns of Huni, Sneferu, and Cheops, it is perhaps worth considering here a few fragments found in the neighborhood of the three queens’ pyramids at Giza which are more likely to come from the pyramid temple of Cheops than from the chapels of his queens. It should be emphasized again here that no trace of anything was found that could possibly indicate that the secret tomb of Hetep-heres possessed a superstructure with a decorated chapel. In my History of Egyptian Sculpture and Painting in the Old Kingdom, p. 157, I have pointed out that, contrary to former opinion, there is evidence that part of the funerary temple of Cheops and at least the causeway corridor of Chephren’s temple were decorated with limestone reliefs. The chief evidence rests on two blocks that were discovered just before the war when the Cheops temple was cleared. These have now been published by Lauer in Annales du Service, 49 (1949), pp. 111 ff., and drawings of the two blocks are given again here in Figs. 5 and 6 . The inscription on one block mentions the Pyramid of Cheops, and these reliefs evidently come from the walls of the great court where they would have been protected by the roof of the surrounding colonnade. In the debris of the causeway, near the entrance to the temple were also found a few small fragments which are shown in Fig. 7. These contribute little to a knowledge of the scheme of decoration. More important are two blocks with representations of ships for which I cannot find any close parallels, although fragments from Lisht and from the Weserkaf temple are somewhat similar. They suggest a

5 The whole group of fragments can be briefly summarized as

(I) Probably from architrave over false-door: No. 24-11- 286 b. Horizontal inscription in large hieroglyphs read- ing: . . . [nswt] sAt wrt HtS . . . (see Fig. 4; also Smith, A History . . . pl. 38).

(2) Two fragments, probably from the tablet of one of the false-doors : (a) 24-1 1-242 a : ewer and basin and on right one register of offerings. Above, part of queen’s title wrt hts; (b) part of offering list with name of green eye-paint wADt. See Fig. 4.

(3) Number 24-11-286 c could be placed on the back of the outer niche of either of the false-doors or in space north of northern niche. Traces of border block-pattern in green and blue and, on right, part of an offering bearer who held up a jar on each side of him. Above: int. . . . See Fig. 4.

(4) Fragments of a boat being paddled to right: Nos. 24-11- 242 and 286. See Fig. 2 (Smith, loc. cit., pl. 38).

( 5 ) Perhaps from west wall between two niches: two groups of fragments that appear to belong together. Parts of three

registers of figures proceeding to right. Above, only the feet of a woman; in the second register, the feet of a dwarf and a woman in a green dress with a distorted shoulder. These figures approach a dais on which was probably a seated figure of the queen. The third register ran beneath this and contained a man leading an ox (over which is written iwA) towards what may be a pile of offerings. See Fig. 3 (Smith, loc. cit., pl. 38).

(6) Four fragments with traces of inscriptions : (a) the legs of an estate figure in front of which is written . . . w determined by the town sign. Behind the figure is . . . w which must have formed part of the name of a second estate; (b) 24-11-286 k: part of a vertical inscription: . . . b . . Hmt [nswt]; (c) 24-11-242 e: perhaps from same inscription: . . . [nsw]t bity . . .; (d) 24-11-242 f: perhaps also from same inscription: . . . [X]wf[w] . . . b . . . (see Fig. 4).

At least five more unintelligible fragments were found, one with the sign nswt, but these add nothing to an interpretation of the pieces.

follows :


royal ceremony of a religious nature connected with Buto, and were found in the debris between Pyramid G I-a and G I-c. Inscriptions on several other fragments refer to a queen and, like others, could have come from either the temple or a queen’s chapel? It may be that further study of the Fourth Dynasty blocks found reused in the construction of the Twelfth Dynasty pyramid of Amenemhat I at Lisht will be able to establish that they were taken in part from the Cheops temple at Giza. Whatever their source may have been, these Lisht blocks certainly prove that many of the scenes we know from the royal funerary temples of Dynasty V were already anticipated in Dynasty IV. However, not until the area around the two pyramids at Dahshur has been excavated, will we be able to know whether satis- factory evidence for the decoration of royal temples and queens’ chapels has survived in this most important period of its development. It cannot be too often stated how important it is that work be undertaken at Dahshur.

Queen Hetep-heres is entirely unknown, except for the meager information supplied by the titles given upon objects in her tomb. Her name was adopted by a number of other ladies of the following period, the most important of whom politically was probably her granddaughter, Hetep-heres II This lady was the wife of the Crown Prince Ka-wab and later the wife of King Dedef-ra. She is represented in the rock-cut tomb of her daughter Queen Meresankh III (G 7530-7540). It is relevant to speculate a little about Hetep-heres I on the basis of what is known about family relationships at Giza. Assuming that the Turin Papyrus is correct in assigning 24 years each to the reigns of Huni and Sneferu and 23 years to Cheops, it is possible to make certain deductions. Two sons of Cheops are known to have reached middle age at the end of his 23-year reign. The Crown Prince Ka-wab must have died at about the same time as his father, since another son, Dedef-ra, succeeded to the throne. Ka-wab appears in his daughter’s tomb (G 7530-7540) as a portly man of mature years. Prince Khufu-khaf is also shown as a fat man beyond his first youth in his tomb (G 7130-7140) which was being completed in the last year of his father’s reign (that of the 12th cattle count). Cheops must therefore have been a man beyond his early twenties when he ascended the throne at the end of Sneferu’s 24-year reign. This would imply that Sneferu married Cheops’s mother, Hetep-heres, some time in the latter part of the reign of Huni, if we estimate roughly that a man’s first son would have been born when he was about eighteen. There is a suggestion here that the marriage of Sneferu and Hetep-heres was intended to secure the succession, and one wonders whether the occasion for this may not have been the death of the owner of Mastaba No. 17 at Medum, who may well have been the heir to the throne of Huni.

5

6 These fragments on Fig. 7 can be summarized as follows

(1) 24-11-548: red granite fragment with hawk in sunk relief, which probably surmounted the king’s Horus name on one of the columns of the temple court.

(2) 37-3-4 d : white limestone relief of hawk from inscription. (3) 37-3-4 c: part ‘of vulture protecting king as in Fig. 5. (4) 37-3-4 h: small figure apparently carrying one of door-

(5 ) 37 -3 -4 i : hand of small figure holding staff. (6) 37-3-4 b : head of goat. (7) 37-3-48: hand holding opened papyrus scroll. (8) 37-3-4 f: two unintelligible fragments. (9) 24-11-889: oars from large boat; from debris of G I-a. G I-c. (10) 24-12-14: two boat paddles against water; from north of

G I-a. G I-a. (11) 24-12-545: above a border with stars are shown ropes

which suggest the rigging of a ship ; below, a hieroglyph which may be Ssp, from area between G I-a and G I-b.

(12) 24-12-546: curved line of a boat above a rectangle of

water; above, in large hieroglyphs, pr nsr (determined by a shrine). From area between G I - a and G I-b.

(13) 24-12-97: from two vertical lines of queen’s titles : (I) . . . . mAA Hr [StH] . . .; (2) . . . [wrt] Hts . . . From debris north of G I-a.

(14) 24-12-57: figures of girl and boy. Girl called . . . Xwfw and boy named Hr . . . (probably the name of Hr-Dd-f, the son of Cheops buried in G 7210-7220). If these are children of Cheops, they may have been shown either in his temple or in the chapel of his chief queen. From debris north of G I-a.

(15) 24-11-473: small male head ; from debris north of G I-b. (16) 26-2-24: arm of man leading an ox; from debris of

(17) 24-11-922: head of aleph hieroglyph; from debris east of

7 We must assume here that Khufu-khaf adopted this name at the time of his father’s accession, much as Nefer-seshem-ptah, who is shown in the reliefs of the Unas causeway, took the name Uza-ha-Tety when King Tety came to the throne.

(1-8 from causeway):

pivots of temple.


It is now clear that Queen Meresankh I, who is mentioned in a later graffito in the temple of Medum, is not Sneferu’s wife but his mother, as she appears on the Cairo fragment of the Palermo Stone. Meresankh seems to have been a minor queen, but one in a position of such favor that she was able to bring her son to the throne. Her position as queen-mother was such as to give her the prominence that is implied by the popularity of the name for ladies of the Fourth Dynasty. Another name, like Meresankh and Hetep-heres, frequently employed in the Old Kingdom, is that of Merytyetes. It appears as the name of a queen on a stela found at Giza by Mariette. He’does not state exactly where it stood in the Eastern Cemetery, but since he compares the dress of the lady with that of the mother of Khufu-khaf, there is a slight implication that he may have found it somewhere nearby when he was excavating the mastaba G 7130-7140. The stela has since disappeared, although it was copied by de Rougé (Fig. 8).

Merytyetes, in addition to other titles of a queen, calls herself wrt Hts of Sneferu and Cheops and ‘honored before’ (imAxw xr) Chephren. Two fragments which can be plausibly restored on the facçade of the chapel of Prince Ka-wab (G 7120), south of the entrance to the inner offering room, seem to reflect the composition of the scene where Khufu-khaf is shown with his mother, a queen who was probably Henutsen, the owner of G I-c (Fig. 9; compare Smith, A History . . . pl. 44). The inscription restored with another fragment, on the right in Fig. 9, is unique but seems to read: (a) ‘[Her son, her beloved Ka]-wab’; (b) The daughter of her God, [She who is in charge of] the affairs [of the imAt (Harem?)], Merytyetes, [his mother] who bore (him) to Khufu.’ However we reconstruct this inscrip- t ion, it gives clearly the name of Merytyetes and suggests the titles of a queen as well as a relationship to Cheops. A small fragment with the queen’s title smAwt [nbty] mry found in the chapel of Ka-wab’s wife (G 7110) suggests that the queen was again represented in this twin-mastaba. The northern chapel must have been originally assigned to Hetep-heres II who would only have been given the title of princess before her marriage to Dedef-ra. It may be a coincidence that the arrangement of the signs on the fragment corresponds closely to the way they are written on the Mariette stela (Fig. 8), but it certainly does make one wonder whether the Merytyetes stela could have been set up during the reign of Chephren in the chapel of G 7110.

The position of Ka-wab’s tomb makes it certain that he was the son of Cheops’s chief queen buried in the Pyramid G I-a. The above evidence would strongly suggest that this chief queen was Merytyetes and that the mother of Ka-wab and the owner of the Mariette stela were the same person. It has been assumed that the inscriptions of the Mariette stela implied that Merytyetes was the wife of both Sneferu and Cheops and that as an old lady she also entered the harem of Chephren. However, if Cheops married Merytyetes within the first ten years of the reign of Sneferu, he would have ascended the throne at the age of about thirty-five and died at the end of a 23-year reign when his eldest son, Prince Ka-wab, had reached the age of about forty. Even if these deductions are only approximately correct, Merytyetes would have occupied an important position throughout a large part of the reign of Sneferu as wife of the heir apparent. It would not be surprising, then, if in her old age, two reigns later, she should give herself the same title of wrt Hts during the reign of Sneferu that she did during her husband’s later

8 B. Grdseloff, Annales du Service, 42 (1943), p. I 18; kindly confirmed and amplified by Prof. Cerny, who first read this name on the stone.

9 There are such strong objections on philological grounds to the reconstruction which appears on the right of Fig. 9 that in the Journal of Near Eastern Studies (‘Inscriptional Evidence for the History of Dynasty IV’), 11 (1952), p. 114, fig. 2, I have used only the more certain reconstruction of two of the three fragments shown on the left of Fig. 9. However, the unique nature

of the three fragments leads me to publish here the two drawings, side by side, in the hope that they may lead to a better interpretation of the inscription.

10 The emplacement of this chapel north of the sloping passage to Ka-wab’s burial chamber has inadvertently been omitted from the sketch plan in Fig. I, as on the map of the Eastern Cemetery in Vol. I. The stones forming part of the false-door are in- adequately shown in fig. 6 of Vol. I. It is planned to reproduce a more complete plan in Volume III of this series.


reign. In the time of Chephren she simply states that she was in an honored position, and it should be noted that she was apparently not his mother. She should have been buried in Pyramid G I-a.

It looks very much, then, as though Merytyetes and Cheops were children of Sneferu and Hetep- heres and were both born in the later part of the reign of Huni. In this case Cheops need not have been more than fifty-eight at the time of his death. Hetep-heres might have been nearly sixty if she died within the first decade of Cheops’s reign, while Merytyetes would have been in her late sixties in the first five years of Chephren’s reign. The three great ladies of the early part of the dynasty were, then, Meresankh I, a minor wife of Huni and the mother of Sneferu; Hetep-heres I, the daughter of Huni’s chief queen and the wife of Sneferu and mother of Cheops; and Merytyetes I, the daughter of Sneferu and Hetep-heres and the wife of Cheops. Hetep-heres seems to have been deprived of her title of queen mother by the untimely death of Prince Ka-wab and the accession to the throne of Dedef-ra, who seems to have been the son of the unknown queen buried in G I-b. Dedef-ra’s successor, Chephren, appears as one of three sons of Cheops in the Westcar Papyrus where he relates a tale about a magician in the time of the Third Dynasty king Neb-ka. It has been suggested that in the lost beginning of the papyrus it was possibly Ka-wab who told of an incident that occurred in the reign of Zoser. In turn, after Chephren, another son of Cheops, Baw-f-ra, describes a feat performed by the magician Zaza-m-ankh for King Sneferu, and Dedef-hor introduces to Cheops a magician named Dedi who lived in his own time. The tomb of Dedef-hor (G 7210-7220) adjoins that of Ka-wab on the east, and Reisner was inclined to identify the nameless vizier of the next tomb (G 7310-7320) as Baw-f-ra on the basis of his appearance with Dedef-hor in the Westcar Papyrus. Both these princes were then probably, like Ka-wab, the sons of Queen Merytyetes, while their sister was Queen Meresankh 11, who was buried in G 7410- 7420. Chephren, on the other hand, does not seem to have been a son of Merytyetes, since in his reign she does not call herself ‘Mother of the King of Upper and Lower Egypt’. In spite of this, Chephren seems to have regarded himself as a representative of the main (or Giza) branch of the family in opposi- tion to the descendants of the second queen of G I-b. The evidence for the Libyan origin of this queen rests only on the ‘red’ or ‘yellow’ hair of her supposed daughter, Queen Hetep-heres II, shown in the tomb of Queen Meresankh III. Caroline Ransom Williams long ago pointed out that the red lines across the yellow surface of her headdress must be interpreted as conventional drawing lines, while I have called attention to a similar headdress worn by Zoser’s queen, the lady of the Bankfield Stela, and the mother of Khufu-khaf. Since Reisner has identified the lady represented with Khufu-khaf in G 7140 as Henutsen, the owner of the adjoining Pyramid G I-c, it is unlikely that her hair as well as her dress would so much have resembled those of Hetep-heres II unless they were the fashion of the period. Mariette also describes the figure of Merytyetes on her stela as having a pointed shoulder to her dress like that in G 7140. It would seem that we are dealing with a wig somewhat like the king’s head- cloth in shape and that it is unsafe to give an ethnic interpretation to the yellow coloring which happens to be preserved only in the case of Hetep-heres 11.

While it seems a pity to spoil the romantic legend of the ‘red-haired queen’, it would appear probable that Hetep-heres II, like her husband Ka-wab, was a child of Cheops and Merytyetes. It was intended that this pair of favorite children were to be buried in the first twin-mastaba (G 7110-7120) to be built in front of the pyramid of Merytyetes. We have also seen that a queen was represented in the chapel intended for Hetep-heres as well as in that of Ka-wab. It is also likely that Dedef-ra, who already had a chief queen named Khentet-n-ka, married Hetep-heres in order to strengthen his claim to the throne by an alliance with a princess of the direct line.

7

11 Smith, A History of Egyptian Sculpture and Painting in the Old Kingdom, pp. 134, 143, 262, fig. 48, pl. 44.


Even though we reject the Libyan origin of Dedef-ra, this does not alter the fact that his reign inter- rupts the line of Giza kings. He set himself apart-by beginning a new royal cemetery at Abu Roash, and all work seems to have stopped at Giza on the tombs of Cheops’s favorites in both the Eastern and Western Cemeteries. It is significant that among the tombs in the Western Cemetery which were in the process of being enlarged with an addition of heavy masonry and an interior chapel only that of Hemiunu (G 4000) was finished in about the year 19 (HAt sp 10). Work on the chapel of Prince Seshat-sekhentiu (G 2120) ceased in the year of the 12th counting, the last year of the reign of Cheops when the tomb of Khufu-khaf (G 7130-7140) in the Eastern Cemetery was being completed. The second and third tombs in the southern row of that cemetery (G 7230-7240 and G 7330-7340), which could have originally been assigned to Dedef-ra and Chephren, were completed with rubble and brick chapels, while that of Prince Min-khaf (G 7430-7440) was not finished until the reign of Chephren. Reisner has shown in Vol. I that Cheops’s original plan for the cores of the eight twin-mastabas did not include interior chapels. However, the idea of enlarging these tombs and introducing interior chapels was conceived in the reign of Cheops, since the name of one of his working gangs (Hrwy Nb rxw [not txw as formerly read] aprw) was found on casing stones along the eastern face of the finished mastaba of Dedef-hor (G 7210-7220). The quarry marks on the casing of his mastaba show that Hemiunu began to case the west face of the core of G 4000 in the year 15, but it was not until the year 19 that he completed the addition on the east face, which contained an interior chapel. This tends to confirm the date of year 15 from the Cheops temple and the introduction shortly afterwards of the interior chapel in the Eastern Cemetery.

During the eight years of Dedef-ra’s reign no royal assistance seems‘to have been given to any project at Giza that remained incomplete at the death of Cheops. Many members of Cheops’s family had reached an advanced age and evidently died natural deaths during this reign. Such finishing touches in rubble and brick were given to the incomplete chapels as the slender resources of their owners could now provide. These people were out of favor at court, but the malicious erasure of Dedef-hor’s inscriptions may indicate that more drastic action was taken by Dedef-ra against the children of the chief queen . These princes may have been executed, although Merytyetes herself survived into the next reign. Thus at the death of Dedef-ra, Chephren and Min-khaf may have been the only surviving sons of Cheops. Perhaps they were children of Queen Henutsen and younger brothers of Prince Khufu- khaf. This would explain why Chephren felt that he was restoring to-power the legitimate branch of the royal house, although not himself the son of the chief queen of Cheops. He was probably aided by Prince Ankh-haf, who we will see was of an older generation, and by Nefermaat, a grandson of Sneferu, who seems to have been Chephren’s third vizier in turn after Ankh-haf and Min-khaf. Hetep- heres II cannot have been loyal to her second husband, Dedef-ra, since her daughter by Ka-wab, Meresankh III, was married to Chephren, and Hetep-heres herself returned to Giza for burial. The pyramid of Dedef-ra was perhaps never completed, but its present terribly wrecked condition probably owes much to a reprisal undertaken by Chephren to avenge the ill-treatment of members of the Cheops family at Giza.

While these speculations as to the later development of family history in Dynasty IV may seem to be taking us rather far afield from the lifetime of Hetep-heres I, they are nevertheless pertinent, since she

12 Junker, on the other hand, has suggested (Giza, VII, 1944, p. 26) that the destruction of Dedef-hor’s chapel occurred in the troubled times after the fall of the Old Kingdom. He produces interesting evidence for a cuIt of Dedef-hor as early as the late Old Kingdom resembling that of the Vizier Kagemni at Saqqara. In a little tomb attached to the mastaba of Seshem-nofer (G 4940) in the Western Cemetery, a man says that he was ‘honored

before Dedef-hor’ (imAxw xr Hr-Dd-f). Here there is no association between this tomb and that of Dedef-hor (G 7210-7220) as in the case of the followers of Kagemni who were buried around that vizier’s great mastaba. It might be that by this time Dedef- hor was only known by his writings as was the case when the much later ‘Song of the Harper’ was composed.


was the ancestress of the great men of the dynasty. Not only were the kings of Dynasty IV her direct descendants but she was the mother of the famous wise man Dedef-hor and related to all the viziers who served from the creation of that office in the reign of her husband Sneferu until the beginning of Dynasty V. As part of the system of keeping all government control in the hands of the royal family, these viziers seem frequently to have been the eldest sons of minor queens. By granting the highest office in the land to men who by reason of their birth might aspire to the throne, it was evidently hoped to bind them more closely in loyalty to the king. The first man whom we know to have held this office was Prince Nefermaat of Medum. His son, Hemiunu, was a grown man with important titles when his father constructed his tomb at Medum. He is almost certainly the same Hemiunu whose statue shows him as a portly man of advanced age when as vizier to Cheops he was constructing his own tomb at Giza in the nineteenth year of that king. Therefore, it would seem reasonable to place Nefermaat as a son of King Huni, particularly now that the Medum Pyramid seems to belong to that king rather than to Sneferu.

Nefermaat, as far as we can determine, was followed in the vizierate by Kanofer, the eldest son of Sneferu by a minor queen. This was perhaps towards the end of the reign, since there is reason to believe that only mature or elderly statesmen were considered fit to serve in a position of such responsibility. It also should be assumed that it was an office not lightly cast aside. It is extremely unlikely that retire- ment would be granted except on the grounds of serious ill health or extreme age. The disfavor of the king would probably have resulted in death, and we should hardly expect to encounter a case where a vizier would be able to build a large tomb after he had laid aside the office. In the case of Kanofer, his tomb at Dahshur in the old Sneferu cemetery has as its only decoration a stela which was inscribed for his father by a son who was evidently named after Cheops’s eldest son Ka-wab. The long inscriptions are in sunk relief, which is known first in Min-khaf‘s tomb in the reign of Chephren. Kanofer also has a daughter named Kha-merer-nebty, a name which we know first as that of the wife of Chephren, although it could have been familiar to Kanofer fairly early in the reign of Cheops, and like that of Ka-wab, adopted for one of his own children. It is then possible that Kanofer remained vizier for a few years under Cheops until Hemiunu took over the vizierate. It is perhaps not too fanciful to see in Kanofer a disgraced vizier whose proper funerary cult could not be undertaken until the reign of Chephren.

For our present purposes it is Hemiunu who is the most interesting of these viziers, since we have seen that he was building his tomb in the year 15 when it has been suggested the secret tomb of Hetep- heres was prepared at Giza. Since like other viziers he also held the position of Overseer of all the King’s Works, he was probably responsible for the greater part of the work on the Great Pyramid, even though his predecessor may have worked out the plans for that structure. It would seem almost certain that he was the man who undertook the delicate task of convincing Cheops that his mother’s burial must be transferred from Dahshur to Giza and then actually carried out this bold plan. Anyone who has studied the imperious features of Hemiunu’s magnificent seated statue in Hildesheim would not doubt that here was a shrewd, able man who could conceive a great project and who would brook no interference in bringing it to completion. If the conjecture is correct that he had witnessed the disgrace of his predecessor Kanofer, he would be more than wary in protecting himself in the crisis brought about by the robbing of the Dahshur tomb of Hetep-heres.

Hemiunu must have died shortly after the quarry mark of the year 19 was written on the casing of his tomb, for three or four more viziers followed him at the end of the reign. These men all present problems of identification, and one could only be presumed to have held office because of the wealth and power represented by his enormous tomb, G 2000. This mastaba is the largest at Giza, even larger than those of the viziers Ankh-haf and Hemiunu. The white limestone casing had only been

9


commenced. It was intended to cover a facing of small stepped blocks built around the heavy masonry core, as in G 7410-7420. Reisner concluded that this peculiar construction should be dated within a range of the last two years of Cheops and the first five of Chephren. The chapel was destroyed to the foundations and no trace of name .or title survived. The disturbed blocking indicated that the burial chamber had been entered in ancient times, but it gave a curious impression of undisturbed emptiness with two sealed pottery jars and some ox bones lying as a food offering in front of a decayed wooden coffin in which the bones of the owner lay outstretched. Dr. Douglas Derry formed the opinion that the skull was that of a very old man of unusual mental capacity. It is likely that he belonged to the generation of Cheops, like Hemiunu and Ankh-haf.

While there is obviously no evidence that the owner of G 2000 was a vizier of Cheops, it is very likely that the man who bore vizier’s titles in G 7310-7320 served in this office during the last few years of Cheops’s reign. We have seen that he has been given the name Baw-f-ra because of the association of that name with Dedef-hor in the Westcar Papyrus. There is some new evidence, also, that Khufu- khaf became vizier at the very end of the reign. A small fragment of the base of a diorite statuette in Boston bearing his name is evidently part of the broken seated figure of a man bearing the titles of vizier as shown in Fig. I I . This statuette, No. 46 in the Cairo Museum (Borchardt, Catalogue General, LIII, Statuen, I, 1911, p. 42), was found in 1888 in the Isis Temple, which in late times was built out over the top of Khufu-khaf’s mastaba. The two pieces were thus once in close proximity to each other. The new fragment does not actually form a join, but a plaster cast sent to the Cairo Museum was found to correspond very well to the missing corner of the base. In his own chapel Khufu-khaf bears only the title of Chancellor of Lower Egypt, which seems to have formed one of the steps to the vizierate. A large piece of an architrave with the titles of a vizier, found in the queen’s boat grave, resembles very much in the style of the cutting and the weathering of the stone other fragments from the chapel of Khufu-khaf’s wife (G 7130). It looks very much as though the prince became vizier after he had decorated his own chapel and before the reliefs in his wife’s chapel were cut and the statue prepared for his tomb, perhaps in the last year of the reign of Cheops when work was still continuing on his mastaba.

Finally, there is one other man who presents difficulties which have not yet been satisfactorily solved. This is Prince Hor-baf. The burial chamber of G 7420 is the only one not accounted for in which the measurements of the passage and the turning recess at the bottom of the shaft would accommodate his granite sarcophagus, now in the Cairo Museum. A fragment of his name Hr . . . survived from the chapel wall, but other fragments of a prince’s titles come from the northern chapel of this twin-mastaba (G 7410-7420) where there is represented a woman with the title of Princess. The man possessed a Cheops estate and was connected with the service of the Pyramid of Cheops. He had the title ‘Great One of the Five of the House of Thoth’, which in the Fourth Dynasty is never held by a man who is not a vizier, although it seems to have been dropped in the Fifth Dynasty, when no vizier is known to have this title. It is hard to escape the impression that these two chapels were decorated by the same group of workmen for the Princess Meresankh and her husband Hor-baf. The name of Meresankh was found on a granite sarcophagus in the burial chamber of G 7410, and here she is given the titles of a queen. It looks as though Meresankh married a king as her second husband, but his identification is impossible at present. Reisner favored Dedef-ra as a possibility and also suggested that Hor-baf may have been a son of Meresankh. The name of a daughter, Nebty-tp-itf-s, which Reisner translated ‘The crown which is on the brow of her father’, is the only scrap of evidence which might suggest that the northern chapel was decorated after Meresankh became queen, but the prominence of the titles of a prince in this chapel and the fact that Meresankh is called ‘princess’ in the boating scene (Smith,


A History. . . fig. 63) make it seem more likely that Hor-baf was her husband. If this is so, we should probably have to fit Hor-baf in as another vizier of the end of the reign of Cheops.

There are three other members of the family of Sneferu who should be taken into account in study- ing the life of Hetep-heres. They are Prince Ankh-haf, his wife Hetep-heres, and the Princess Nefert- kaw, who is called the eldest daughter of Sneferu in the tomb of her son Nefermaat (G 7060) and in that of her grandson Sneferu-khaf (G 7070). Ankh-haf has the second largest tomb at Giza (G 7510), which was built to the east of the first row of twin-mastabas in the Eastern Cemetery, as the first of the additions to this cemetery in the reign of Chephren. He is the eldest son of a king, and his wife was the eldest daughter of a king. In his tomb is represented with him a boy named Ankhetef who is called the son of his daughter. This suggests that Ankh-haf had reached an advanced age when he built his great tomb with its beautifully cut low reliefs and the wonderful portrait bust in red-painted limestone. His wife Hetep-heres, in a broken inscription (see Fig. IO), seems to have held a priesthood of Sneferu, and this combined with her name suggests that she was the oldest daughter of Sneferu and Hetep-heres I and that Ankh-haf was the eldest son of Sneferu and a minor queen. There was no burial place for Hetep-heres in G 7510. It would seem that she had died earlier and was perhaps buried at Dahshur.

Although it has been suggested that Ankh-haf served Cheops as vizier, it now looks as though he were one of the members of the family who, with Min-khaf, Nefert-kaw’s son Nefermaat, and the two queens Hetep-heres II and Meresankh II, survived the reign of Dedef-ra to serve the new king Chephren. As a man of advanced years he probably became his first vizier, to be followed in turn by Min-khaf and Nefermaat.

Princess Nefert-kaw has been known as the eldest daughter of Sneferu since the discovery of the tombs of her son and grandson by Lepsius. She was probably buried in G 7050 which lies east of the other two tombs, G 7060 and 7070, but no name or inscriptions were recovered and the burial chamber was completely plundered. She seems to have been the daughter of a minor queen of Sneferu, and there is no evidence that she was ever married to Cheops, although she was probably buried in a mastaba south of the pyramid of his third queen (G I-c). It may be that the lady with the same name, Nefert- kaw, who was the wife of Prince Khufu-khaf, was her child and an older sister of Nefermaat (G 7060). This would strengthen the association with the children of Henutsen, which we have suggested above in proposing that Chephren and Min-khaf might have been younger brothers of Khufu-khaf. Nefer- maat’s title of prince could have been a courtesy one as is certain in the case of his son Sneferu-khaf (G 7070). Both emphasize their relationship to Sneferu. Nefermaat seems to have served as vizier to Chephren after Ankh-haf and Min-khaf.

To complete the list of viziers of Dynasty IV it might be worth while to examine the sons of Chephren and two men who were probably his grandsons. These viziers served in the last reigns of the dynasty and early in Dynasty V. Prince Duwanera, the son of Chephren and Meresankh III was the owner of the large mastaba G 5110 in the southeast corner of the Western Cemetery. He is probably to be placed as the first vizier of Mycerinus. The owner of the adjoining mastaba (G 5230), Prince Ba-ba-f, was probably the son of Duwanera and can be plausibly placed as a vizier of Shepseskaf. The princes Min-yuwen, Ankhmara, and Nekaura probably followed Duwanera as viziers of Mycerinus. The parentage of Min-yuwen and Ankhmara is uncertain. Both are buried in the Chephren quarry with members of his family and that of Mycerinus. Nekaura dated his will in the twenty-third year of a king

11

13 Closely associated with his tomb is the mastaba of Khemten (G 5210), who was the family steward of Ka-wab, Hetep-heres, and Meresankh 111. Duwanera’s name was probably in the broken place in Khemten’s inscription as the last mentioned

member of the family. His name is partly preserved in the tomb of his brother Nebemakhet (LG 86), where Meresankh III is shown with her children by Chephren.


(HAt sp 12), and since it is likely that he served as vizier at an advanced age, it seems better to assign him to the end of the reign of Mycerinus rather than to the later years of his father Chephren. Finally, one more son of Chephren, Sekhem-ka-ra, had an unusually long life. He tells us he lived into the reign of Sahura, and it seems plausible to follow Weill in making him a vizier of Weserkaf and in the first few years of the reign of Sahura. If Grdseloff is correct in making Weserkaf the son of Princess Nefer-hetep-s, the daughter of Dedef-ra, and if he married Khent-kaw-s, probably a daughter of Mycerinus, there would have been combined in the first king of Dynasty V the two conflicting strains of the Fourth Dynasty royal family. It would have served Weserkaf’s purpose very well to employ as vizier an elderly prince, one of the sons of Chephren.

Actually we know very little about the lives of these contemporaries and descendants of Queen Hetep-heres I, except for the often fragmentary hints of their family relationships. Events are barely suggested in the broken pieces of the Old Kingdom Annals or an occasional royal inscription. The writings of Dedef-hor are lost except for a line or two at the beginning of a book of admonitions. On the other hand, religious beliefs are richly illustrated in the Pyramid Texts which were in the process of being formulated during this period. The concept of the continuance of life after death caused the great people of the time and their possessions to be pictured in stone sculpture. The faces of these men and women become strangely familiar to us in the wonderful portrait sculpture of the time, and in the furniture which has miraculously survived in the tomb of Hetep-heres I we have before our eyes the actual furnishings of a palace of the time of Sneferu and Cheops.

Apart from the pleasure to be gained from the beautiful craftsmanship of these pieces, this furniture has an added interest because it belongs to a crucial time in the development of Egyptian art. The artists were reaching a peak of creative ability at the end of the brilliant development of the first three dynasties. The justly famous seated statues of Rahotep and Nofret from Medum represent this culmina- tion in the reign of Sneferu and are followed by the Giza reserve heads, the seated figure of Hemiunu, the bust of Ankh-haf, and the extraordinary royal works in hard stone of the reigns of Dedef-ra, Chephren, and Mycerinus. Reisner brought the exciting implications of this period of accomplishment into sharp relief by picturing Hetep-heres carried forth in her ebony and gold carrying-chair to visit Imhotep’s temple complex at the Saqqara Step Pyramid at which men still marveled, and on another day visiting the rocky plateau at Giza which was still nearly bare but where Cheops was beginning his great pyramid. The queen would have been familiar with the two pyramids of her husband Sneferu at Dahshur and that at Medum, which was probably constructed by her father Huni.

The same bold simplicity of execution so perfectly embodied in the sculpture of Dynasty IV is to be found in the shattered paintings in the chapel of Nefermaat’s wife Atet at Medum, combined with a masterly use of color and brushwork. This richness of large-scale design is to be seen in the furniture of Hetep-heres but combined with traces of a transitional period best to be detected in the relief sculpture which was in the process of changing from the rather heavy high relief of the reign of Sneferu to the delicate low cutting of the reigns of Cheops and Chephren. There is a complicated use of decorative patterns such as the flower rosettes or the hawk and Neith elements of one armchair. These and the mat patterns worked out in inlay or in the gold framing borders reflect some of the exuberant fertility of invention which characterizes the Third Dynasty architecture of Imhotep. They contrast with the large masses of the papyrus flowers on the first armchair and the gold relief of the seated queen (Fig. 30). The precious incrustation is applied to furniture which is characterized by severe simple lines of a more sober nature.

14 Annales du Service, 42 (1943), 64 ff.

i the family and general background of queen hetep-heres i

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